Army of Two

New albums from Tori Amos and Björk.

By the time Tori Amos was thirty, she had been through several drafts of a career. A child piano prodigy, she was the youngest person ever to attend the Peabody Conservatory of Music, in Baltimore. (She was five when she auditioned.) In her early twenties, she was the lone woman in a rock band called Y Kant Tori Read. (The group released a single album, which sold fewer than ten thousand copies.) In 1992, after some wrangling with Atlantic Records, whose executives were apparently dubious about the commercial potential of what they called “this girl-at-her-piano thing,” she released a solo album, “Little Earthquakes,” on which she sang about Christianity, body image, and, in the remarkable song “Me and a Gun,” rape, often with the force and sometimes even the sound of her idol, Robert Plant. “Little Earthquakes” was the first in a series of albums by Amos which helped prove that a girl at her piano could make songs that were as artistically complex and, sometimes, just as popular as those of a shaggy boy with an electric guitar.

A year later, the Icelandic musician Björk released her first solo album, “Debut.” Like Amos, Björk had recently left a rock band full of men, the Sugarcubes, a successful independent group and the fourth she had been in since she started playing piano and singing publicly, at the age of eleven. Björk’s main instrument is her voice, a glassy, elastic alto with the sonic power and range of an electric guitar. She found inspiration in dance music and the electronic instruments used to make it, increasingly avoiding anything resembling a traditional rhythm section. Amos’s music draws on the baroque songwriting and melodramatic vocals of Kate Bush and the long, expert melodies of Joni Mitchell, and she favors a lineup of bass, guitar, and drums behind her piano.

Amos and Björk are now in their early forties, mothers and artists in a market that has shown little interest in promoting women much over the age of consent, especially avowed feminists who invoke goddesses and (in Björk’s case) will wear a swan in place of a ball gown. Both are releasing new albums this month. Stylistically very different, Amos’s “American Doll Posse” and Björk’s “Volta” are two examples of how a female pop musician can maintain her career without compromising her politics.

In a recent interview with the online magazine Pitchfork, Björk said of “Volta,” “It’s sort of maybe trying to put out some good vibes for the little princesses out there.” She added, “All they want to do is be pretty and find their prince, and I’m, like, what happened to feminism?” Her lyrics are usually less direct. One form her feminism takes is simply ignoring conventional wisdom. Many artists would hesitate to appear on an album cover, as Björk does on “Volta,” in what seems to be an enormous dodo-bird suit covered with a melted sangria candle, especially an attractive woman who could win over all sorts of people by wearing, say, a tighter dodo suit.

The album begins with a rebuke to the White House: “Earth Intruders,” an odd and boisterous song inspired by a visit that Björk made to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. There she envisioned a wave of people taking political action, an image that she described to Pitchfork: “Maybe a tsunami of people would just come and hit the White House and scrape it off the ground and do some justice.”

The music for the song was provided by the ubiquitous producer Timbaland, who in 1999 sampled her majestic track “Jóga” for a remix of Missy Elliott’s song “Hit ’Em wit da Hee.” On “Earth Intruders,” Timbaland bisects a clomping dance with nasty synthesizer howls. Björk begins singing in her full-chest voice—one of pop’s most reliably ecstatic stimuli for the past fifteen years. “Turmoil . . . carnage,” she says, dragging out each word. She speaks the chorus at low volume, nestling the words in the blend of live drum sounds and digital cries: “Here come the earth intruders; there’ll be no resistance. We are the cannoneers, necessary voodoo.” “Earth Intruders” alludes only briefly to her Indonesian epiphany: “And the beast with many heads and arms rolling, steamroller.” Björk has no obligation to make her politics explicit, but it’s a shame that she keeps her anger cloaked. (Of her intentions for “Volta,” she has said, “It’s 2007. It’s not some hippie shit—‘go-back-to-your-roots.’ It’s all march forward.”) Had she included one or two specific references—Washington, cowboys, Black Hawk helicopters—“Earth Intruders” could have grown fangs without becoming preachy.

Björk’s collaborators on “Volta” are eclectic to a fault: the Congolese group Konono No. 1, which plays amplified kalimbas; the frantic drummer Brian Chippendale, of the American duo Lightning Bolt; a ten-piece all-female Icelandic brass band; and a Chinese pipa player, among others. This musical solicitude is a testament to Björk’s fearless curiosity, but her restlessness can be wearying. When disparate teams of musicians attempt to realize one musician’s ideas, every song becomes yet another stone turned over rather than one put in place. On “Volta,” melodic motifs rarely repeat the way they do in most songs, and many of Björk’s vocal performances feel like improvisations.

In “Vertebrae by Vertebrae,” the brass band plays a low chord twice, then moves up a whole step to play another chord four times, and then stops. Though you’re hearing a live band, the music has the feel of a loop, like a Steve Reich ostinato slowed way down. Twice, the music dissolves into parallel sheets of sound; Björk’s voice is reproduced electronically, creating a harmonic foam, while the horns play discrete lines. There’s a looped beat in the murk somewhere, though no one seems to be playing to it, and it’s hard to identify a motif, despite a surfeit of melodic material. “Vertebrae” is one of many songs in which Björk—who grew up with the simple populism of punk, and who launched her solo career by exploiting the equally basic populism of dance beats—makes music that has little to do with pop. Several horn passages in “Vertebrae” and “Wanderlust” have a hypnagogic grace, and “Pneumonia,” one of the few tracks not cluttered with sound, presents a gorgeous chamber-music-style arrangement of horns and voice for what could be Björk’s mission statement: “To shut yourself off would be the hugest crime of all.”

Shutting off is not often a problem for Amos. “American Doll Posse” is aggressive and, occasionally, overstated; Amos fans who have complained that they haven’t heard from “the real Tori” in a while will be relieved. In the past three years, Amos has released only one complete album, “The Beekeeper” (2005), which buried her natural vigor under music that occasionally incorporated gospel and R. & B. but in the end was lax and weirdly docile. “American Doll Posse” returns to her music of the nineties: fired-up songs centered on the piano, her robust singing, a rhythm section, and loud guitar playing more indebted to the seventies than to the ohs.

The album title refers to characters that Amos created for the record: Pip, Tori, Clyde, Santa, and Isabel. These women appear on the cover, five Amoses digitally manipulated to occupy a single space. The one called Tori has long, straight red hair and bangs, wears a floor-length dark skirt, and holds a chicken. (The concept owes much to the work of the artist Cindy Sherman.) If you do some research, you can figure out which character sings which track, but this is unnecessary. Amos has always played a variety of characters in her songs; it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that her work is concerned primarily with how different women experience the world. (Amos once said in a television interview that she was elected homecoming queen simply because she had made an effort to talk to all the girls in her high school.)

Amos’s album, like Björk’s, begins with a rebuke to the Bush Administration: “Yo George,” a dirge for piano and voice, in which Amos (as Pip) sings about the “madness of King George” and asks, tremulously, “Where have we gone wrong, America?” She must know that the public-service announcement is a dicey gambit; the song is only eighty-five seconds long. On “Big Wheel,” a rhythmically assured rock song that features a distorted slide guitar, Amos sings as a woman who is claiming her independence: “Baby, I don’t need your cash, mama got it all in hand now.” And in “Secret Spell” she sings to a younger woman, maybe herself: “Jumps at three, tears at thirteen, just turn you around for eighteen wheels in a high heel, just turn you around, sold a dream at twenty-three.” The guitars on “Secret Spell” are reminiscent of songs by R.E.M., a group whose plangent, chiming guitar style has not been reprised in the twenty-first century as often as, say, U2’s has.

Amos’s anger is appealing, especially when she’s parsing gender stereotypes. She takes on the acronym MILF—a term that “Tori” decides she likes—and a more ageless insult, “fat slut,” which becomes a character in a song of the same name. Björk’s concerns on “Volta” tend to be more global, but “Declare Independence,” a brief punk rant, contains a lyric that would work just as well in a song by Amos: “Declare independence. Don’t let them do that to you. Make your own flag. Raise your flag!” ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.